Staff Editorial
The United States is home to only about 5 percent of the world’s population, but holds almost a quarter of the world’s prison population.
An easier way to analyze the numbers is by breaking down prison population per 100,000. The U.S. has the highest rate in the world, at 655 per 100,000. Brazil is next, with 324 per 100,000. China’s prisoners make up just over one percent of their more than 1 billion strong population with 118 per 100,000. The closest NATO-founding nation is the United Kingdom, with 139 per 100,000.
So why is the U.S. different?
The “tough on crime” policies became increasingly popular in the 1980s after higher global and national crime rates in the 60s and 70s. The U.S. criminal justice system itself is politicized from the top all the way down to local sheriffs, prosecutors and legislators, who noticed the being harsher on crime brought them more votes. Intertwining political and monetary motivation with the lives of millions of Americans is a costly mistake, even as crime rates are declining steadily.
Another possible explanation regards a lack of development of social services in this country. In similarly developed countries, there is nationalized care for issues such as mental health, domestic and substance abuse, homelessness and disenfranchised youth. Instead, non-institutionalized care is severely underfunded and largely up to individual communities and some states to help. The areas most susceptible to crime and being incarcerated tend to be the poorest, so they are already stretched thin for resources.
Those who need the most help are least likely to receive it in our current system. In these areas, there is sometimes not a safety net between day-to-day life and being institutionalized. When people are not given the opportunity to lead a stable life, they will often turn to other, sometimes criminal, means.
Each year, an estimated $182 billion is spent yearly on mass incarceration, with $80 billion spent on the public corrections facilities, $63 billion on policing and $29 billion on criminal law fees, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, a non-profit research group that aims to expose the flaws of mass incarceration and lead to advocacy.
Almost half of the $182 billion spent on running the correctional system goes to paying staff and another at least $15 billion to food and healthcare. Dividing the budget among prisoners, including salaries and interest payments — prisons aren’t cheap to open or to keep running — we are left spending $83,000 per prisoner each year.
For comparison, the national budget allows for a $1,200 per K-12 student in a school year and was cut by 14 percent, or $9 billion last year. In the 2018 federal budge, a discretionary budget of $68 billion was set for the Department of Education, which helps set policy and standard for the almost 57 million students enrolled in K-12 school in fall 2018. The education system is largely decentralized and states fund many of their own education programs as well as set some guidelines, so an average of $13,000 was spent on each student, only about a seventh of what we spend on the incarcerated.
One of the biggest flaws in the system is the lack not only of second chances, but first chances. Without enough resources trickling down to the bottom, how are these people ever going to be able to break the cycle?
Low income areas are frequently overrepresented with minorities and these minorities are also overrepresented in our prison system. African-Americans make up 12 percent of the U.S. population, but over a third of the prison population. Whites, on the other hand, make up about two-thirds of the general population and only 30 percent of the prison population. The gap is getting smaller, with Pew Research analysis showing a decrease in African- Americans behind bars happening at a rate faster than whites. Many link this connection to higher policing in rural, predominantly white areas, as well as the opioid epidemic, which has hit the white population the hardest.
Whether due to political ambitions, crime control, lack of resources, or a combination of all, we have made a decision to spend our resources on incarceration rather than prevention, rehabilitation and education. The only way to work toward a solution is to make changes, decriminalize being disadvantaged and give people their right to a chance to live free.